Figma Config 24' - My Experience
Daniel Herrera
Helping founders build the products of tomorrow, bridging the gaps between design & technology. Creative Technologist | Innovation Strategist
Last month, I returned to SF after 7 years, and a lot has changed since then. Both the city and the world went through a lot during that time, and now I have returned to attend one of the biggest events in the design world: Figma Config 2024.
Day 0 - Config Commons & Kickoff
The activities started on Tuesday at Moscone Center, where we got our tote bag full of goodies and our config badge. I also took the first official picture of the week.
After that, I checked into my hotel and returned to the kickoff event, Config Commons. Where the fun started with people from around the world coming together to share food, drinks, and a passion for design and creativity.
Here, you could get a screenprint t-shirt, take a picture with funny stickers, make your pin button, have lunch with new people, or sit down with other Figma lovers to talk about all the latest and exciting features they would announce the next day. For me, I did the line to get my t-shirt while I waited for my friend Jonathan Sabutis to get there. I grabbed my lunch and soft drink and got my t-shirt with some blue printed flowers on the back.
A little bit later, a few fellow Latin designers arrived, and we started talking and getting in the mood while we enjoyed the official kickoff with more food and drinks. The energy was rising, but the weather was not. We had a beautiful couple of days of Californian sun, but the wind was quite cold, so after sunset, you had to wear a jacket to keep going.
The night ended early because we had to rest for the next day, but everything was set to be a great week.
Day 1 - Keynote, New Features & Meetups
The official event began at 8 a.m., and the lines started to populate to get their badges. Unfortunately, the staff had problems printing them, and people had to wait 3 hours to get theirs to get inside. Luckily for me and my friends, we got ours the day before, and we got in time to find our seats and enjoy the keynote.
The main stage was huge, with music and screens that started showing the fun and colorful images of Config’s branding.
Figma Product Launch Keynote - Dylan Field , CEO & Co-Founder of Figma
Dylan Field showed up on stage to welcome everyone with a big cheer from the crowd. The biggest Config ever, with more than 10,000 attendees from all around the world, gathered together to discuss the present and future of design.
Figma’s new UI, AI features, and a brand new product, Figma Slides (better known as “Flides”), got everyone excited (and a little concerned) about the future of the field.
“Tools should augment your process, not automate your favorite parts.” Jessica Hische
There’s already a lot of coverage around the new features, so I won’t talk about them here. Personally, I like the new UI and the new product, “Flieds,” but the pricing model and other highly reported issues are still unsolved, and I hope they take care of them soon.
A new opportunity to make great software - Henry Modisett , Head of Design at Perplexity
“Technological Innovation is outpacing our ability to apply it”
With new AI products and solutions coming out every week, our jobs as creatives will be more about setting objectives that are aligned
Perplexity isn't another search engine; it's an “Answer Engine” that knows what its users value:
These Northstars guide them as a company in the middle of all the noise of new products and updates coming every week. When you focus on your objectives, you can make better decisions for your users and, therefore, for your company. Consistent value is what creates fandom, and for a product to keep up to that promise, it has to have a clear goal.
"Technology is not useful on its own but becomes useful when applied."
Defining the relationship (between humans and AI) - Samantha Whitmore , CEO & Co-Founder & Jason Yuan , CDO at New Computer
"Boundaries can shift depending on context."
Reimagining personal computing in the era of AI isn't just about integrating all these new technologies and features into an amplified device.
The reality is that with a super-intelligent AI, the experience shouldn't be about how much it knows about the world but how much it knows about its user when it receives a request.
Context is a very big part of communication; for both humans and AI, the context level allows us to understand the nuances between one situation and another. That's why, the next time we ask Siri to book a flight for us, the AIs should know that on top of finding the best time and seat on a plane, it should know that I like to travel with my cat, that I prefer to fly in business class, that I pack lightly, and that I have to get travel insurance on international flights.
All those extra details that a personal assistant would know after a couple of months of working with us, an AI will know them too. The same goes for other tasks and activities, like recognizing patterns in our writing or screen consumption, which gives appropriate advice if it recognizes that we might be going through a rough time.
Dot is a personal assistant developed by New Computer that grows with you by setting the following key pillars for their product:
When we build products with AI, one of our main priorities has to be making them feel more human and designing a user journey that enhances the experience rather than interferes with it. The positive associations that we get from using the product are what will build trust and make people stick with our product.
The good, the bad, and the ugly
After the first couple of sessions, it was time to see the rest of the spaces inside the building. Moscone Center South is huge, and they have different stages for the speakers of the different segments: AI & Innovation, Building Products, Design Craft, Dev & Code, Design Systems, Figma Deep Dives, and Project Management.
The Good: A ton of things to do
Aside from the conferences, there were other spots for some companies and partners to present themselves, as well as a conference room, a podcast booth, and another closed space for media, the Figma Store, a place to customize your tote bag with fabric patches from Figma a cam booth to take pictures with an aura effect, and some walks to leave a message with some post-its.
The Bad: The lines to do any of those things
Everything was packed. From the main entrance, where people were still waiting to get their badges, to the different booths and stores, they felt like a minimum of 2 hours in line, and at the moment, I didn't feel like doing it.
The Ugly: The overflow of people
Because people kept coming late because of the access issues, the stairs and the line to get your lunch were in the same area, so there was a point where I felt like an accident was about to happen, and my friends and I decided to have lunch outside because it was crazy for the first half of the first day. I don't blame anyone in particular, but when you have an event this big, one mistake leads to another one because controlling that amount of people is crazy.
The Design Renaissance - Reginé Gilbert , James Weldon Johnson Professor at New York University
Throughout history, there have been crucial moments that revolutionized the world through art, technology, design, culture, and more. These periods are marked by an influential group that either seeks justice or creates a new mindset. For many of us, that moment comes when we are faced with a major life challenge, and the way we cope and overcome it may well be our own renaissance.
Since late 2022, we have heard about AI every...single...day, how it's going to revolutionize the world and change (and even kill) many jobs and industries; for a tech guy and early adopter like me, I'm excited to see what we can do with all that technology. But like any other breakthrough, it also makes people afraid of the consequences, especially how fast things can change without having much time to adapt.
We creatives are used to looking outside the box to find new challenges and opportunities to bring value to new fields. With the inclusion of new technologies like AI, we have the opportunity to not only create more advanced products and systems but also to be more inclusive, accessible, and interactive than ever before.
Some of the many hats that we will wear in the future are related to our innate human traits, like the following:
"As designers, our role is to blend AI's precision with our creative touch to craft ethical, practical, and innovative solutions. Remember to make them inclusive and accessible."
"Our rigidity is a direct response to our insecurity." - Eric Talbert
I had the pleasure of hearing Reginé for the first time at another conference in Mexico City earlier this year, and it was great to see her again on stage. At the end of her talk, she took this selfie (I'm somewhere in there). I also had the chance to talk to her again and thank her for all the great work that she does for the community and the rest of the field.
A look Inside Teenage Engineering with Jesper Kouthoofd , Director at Teenage Engineering
Teenage Engineering is a design company that has become an icon in the industry. All of their products sell out at launch, and they have a very distinguishable style that stands out in the overproduced era of consumer electronics, where most devices look the same.
Hearing Jesper's life stories and how he became this talented designer who can create unique products for a loyal community that connects with them is something that very few designers have been able to accomplish.
Listening to a creative like him feels more like hearing a rock star in the 80s, where talent and execution trump everything else because many of the things he said were either hilarious or controversial. It feels like if some rules that apply to most of us, he could go around them because he is that good. Honestly, I don't have a problem with that attitude, as long as it does not hurt others, like a politician or a banker.
There were many interesting, insightful, and funny moments from the talk with Jesper, but the one that made me laugh out loud was:
Obviously, everyone laughed because in an industry where user research and user-centric design are at the core of everything that we do, hearing it from a reference in the industry to say that feels counter-intuitive. Still, Jesper explained that it's good to have one or two opinions when you are building something, but when you are a founder and creator, the most important opinion is yours, as you are the biggest believer in what you are doing and why you are doing it.
"Be part of the evolution of design and humanity."
The after-hours
When you have one of the best communities, you know there will be many events around an event like Config, and in a city like SF, you should be prepared to party all day.
Attend 2 ___ Config Afterparty
Because I had a long day the day before, I felt low energy, and I even skipped a couple of talks to return to the hotel and rest a little bit. But I wouldn't miss the chance to meet the SF HQ of one of the biggest design consultancies in the world, Frog.
The place is in the east of the city, next to the Giants stadium, where a game was happening at that time. The office was filled with people in no time; with snacks, drinks, and games, people started to have a good time. We took Polaroid pictures and snapped them on a card to paste on one of the walls. After a while, we had a nice talk and presentation with Pablo Marquez , who was one of the most beloved personalities from the whole conference, called The Dunning-Krueger Effect in Design.
He talked about his journey as a design professional and CEO. Founder of different companies and how we kid ourselves about our abilities when taking a new role or challenge by thinking that everything is going to be okay, but that confidence goes down very quickly in the first stages of every new challenge, as we learn that we were not prepared for it. The trick is to stick with it, keep learning, and continue until your level of confidence matches the level of knowledge that you get while doing the job.
It was a great story and reminder of all the things that we are facing with the inclusion of new technologies like AI and how we have to know that even if things feel scary and unknown, we will only get better at dealing with them and eventually reach the level of confidence to know that we are doing it right again.
After that, there was more music, cocktails, and some raffles for very good products and gifts, which, sadly, we didn't win. After the event ended, they sent us to a bar close by with a very nice view of the city, where we took our last drink and finished the first day of the conference.
领英推荐
Day 2 - Talks, More Lines & Afterparties
The day started early again, but this time, I got a nice breakfast with my good friend?Sandy Lam?and her teammates. After a well-deserved and delicious meal and coffee, we headed back to the conference center.
Why shitty robots are the antidote for Perfectionism - Simone Giertz , Inventor, Robotics Enthusiast, Youtuber
When we are little, we are encouraged to explore and play, and when we get older, we are encouraged to be competitive and work hard. Simone talks about her life journey from being a free, playful girl in Sweden to suffering from performance anxiety to start publishing videos of useless robots that she built for the sake of playing, being creative, and having fun again. I totally relate to that.
One of the most powerful things Simone said was the realization that not everything hard to do is important, just as not everything important should be that hard. We can do hard things that are enjoyable, and instead of trying to become the best by doing the most complicated thing possible, we can become the best at doing what excites us the most.
After becoming viral many times by showing her useless and funny inventions online, Simone decided to renounce her title of "Queen of the shitty robots" to start a product design studio that builds useful products, that while they are not tackling the hardest challenges the world has, they prove to be useful and add value to many customers.
Her many failures and time playing with different projects showed her how to create valuable products that help others while remaining playful and trying new things with her audience.
"My favorite invention by far, is my job."
She finished her talk with a 2-minute brainstorming exercise where she asked the audience to come up with the most amount of use cases for a simple brick wall to give us two great points:
So, if things haven't been going your way after years of giving your best, maybe it's time to follow your enthusiasm, try new things, stick to it, iterate, and find success in the things that excite you the most.
How to bring the craft back to Product Management - Peter Yang , Product Lead at Roblox
If you are like Peter, maybe you became a PM to build great products that people love to use but found instead a bunch of metrics and numbers that you were asked to push as well, taking away the joy of building something meaningful.
Ten practical tactics to help you craft products that you can be proud of, grouped into three categories:
Build with the community: Build in public (in an open platform), share updates often, and talk with your customers regularly.
Feel the customer's pain: Watch customers struggle. Keep a friction log, as new users won't tell you their frictions; they will just leave, and your product won't grow. See how your customers hack your product to do their jobs. This is the best way to extend your product and find new use cases.
Look up and around: Empathizing with the user
Strategy = Focus: The best strategies explain in plain English the diagnosis of the major challenges, a guiding policy to overcome those challenges, and the set of actions to execute. Focusing on the right thing is the best strategy.
Quality and Speed over Scope: You are much better off starting with something simple but high quality and growing from there than complex and with a bunch of bugs.
"Narrow the focus, up the quality, increase the speed." - Frank Slootman
Craft quality products, not beautiful internal docs: Don't confuse the work behind the work with the actual work. The actual work is to understand and identify user problems and then execute based on them. The work behind the work is making presentations, attending meetings, and doing project reviews.
Protect your craft time: To protect your craft time, become great at asynchronous communication and running better meetings. Use a single project channel instead of playing DM telephone. Take notes live during meetings and share them right after.
Set the quality bar: Aim to be one of the highest-quality teams at your company by building a burning desire to leave a mark on what you make. Become detail-oriented and be willing to miss a quarter OKR to ship a higher-quality update.
Use AI to focus on what matters: You should use AI daily to help you extract takeaways from docs, write more concise updates, and get a second opinion when no one else is available.
Bonus: Remember why you got into this field in the first place.
The Broken Promises of Design Systems - Cameron Worboys , Head of Design at Cash App
Many things have to work together to build a good product, and like every other department, a good design system is key to creating consistent quality work. But are design systems living up to their promises? Are we building higher-quality, quicker, and more cohesive solutions, or are we limiting our creativity by sticking to fixed rules and frameworks?
When the world of mobile apps started in 2007 with the release of the first iPhone, many companies squished down their websites to fit into smaller screen sizes.
When UX became standard in the digital world, we found ourselves using different apps with similar layouts and user journeys, making them feel all the same as they used the same rules and frameworks.
This benefits users, as they will never forget where every button and action should be. Still, we are also limiting ourselves in terms of making things unique, making them stand out and be different from the competition.
The three promises of Design Systems:
Components, Tokens, and Guidelines bridge the gap between design and engineering, saving hundreds of work hours.
Is speed always a good thing? - If the cost of speed is a better customer experience, is that a price we are willing to pay?
Design systems switch the question from What's the best solution? to What can we make with what we have? - This made him realize that great ideas never start with a system.
Inconsistency undermines trust, and design systems are really good at creating consistent, rich, and unified screens at a scale that are easier to use, develop, and trustworthy.
However, we cannot continue to conflate consistency with a complete lack of expression, as every company believes in a different way of doing things.
We have to be deliberately different because what is different gets remembered, and what is remembered wins.
We must find new ways to represent new ideas in our systems, delivering on both the function and the feeling. Right now, we are just too functional.
Often contextualized as a list of principles, slightly altered from Dieter Rams, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, or simply as anything that exceeds expectations.
"Design systems alone can't prevent bad design decisions."
The real challenge for quality is helping designers make better decisions by giving them more guidance.
Quality = Clear vision + Great ingredients + Great decisions.
Avoiding the design systems values oasis - Neha Batra , VP of Engineering & Diana Mounter , Head of Design at Github
Trapped in a Values Oasis is an article about the value of influencing without applying authority; in other words, how to make an impact without attaching ourselves to it so that if we leave, the results don't change.
"A great goal to have as a leader is to make yourself dispensible"
This was particularly important at Github when the first design systems team joined in 2016, as it wasn't clear if a designer or an engineer manager should lead them. In the end, Diana, as design lead, managed them, guiding them to make significant progress, from creating a new library of React components from the old CSS library to announcing in late 2020 a complete redesign of Github's UI to a brand new one, with dark mode and a new design system called Primer.
The bigger challenges came when the design system team needed to start working closer together with the engineering team. New PMs and leaders were added to the equation, and the work values and priorities were so different from what they were used to that it created a lot of friction, making Diana remember the article she read and recognize that she kept her team for too long on the same values oasis.
Neha, as a VP of engineering, was looking to integrate many of the new components made by the design systems team into the new features and understood the challenges of making everything work the best way possible. However, it wasn't only about the differences in work cultures but also about many conflicting pressures from different teams and directors to push deadlines and launch the new accessibility features.
The great communication and collaboration between Neha and Diana were key to dealing with all these, as they also faced their own values oasis trap when a new CEO took charge, and Diana was offered to be Head of Design after her former boss left. This made her start questioning everything, from previous successful tactics and approaches to what would be the new ways to bring Github to the next step.
Lessons to Avoid the Values Oasis
"Watch where the pendulum swigs, and try to move with it."
In the end, design systems are a shared responsibility between Engineering, Product, and Design. It's in everyone's best interest to have representation and buy-in from the three teams.
Other talks
There are many other super interesting talks that you can check on Figma's official YouTube channel. Here's the full Playlist of Config 24'
A few others that I recommend:
The afterparties
To close the activities of the second and final day, I signed up for a big afterparty at a nice location from the great community of adplist.org , where I had the pleasure to meet again with my now friend and colleague Daniel Achig-Aranha and head together to the spot. When we got there, we immediately saw that we were in a trendy place, where they had a nicely decorated bar with a nice selection of gin cocktails to choose from, which I love.
After everyone got in, they welcomed everyone, thanked their sponsors and Config for hosting a great conference, brought about 20 pizza boxes (that were barely enough for everyone), and started the party.
We had a good time, with great music, people, and new connections that you never know where they may take you.
The party ended quite early, and I still had a few days in SF, so I wanted to take advantage of my time and enjoy the rest of the night. So, I connected with the Latin group again, and I caught up with them at a bar close to my hotel.
There, I met new designers from Mexico, Colombia, Panamá, and Uruguay. We were all very happy with our experience at our first Config and hope to come back next year.
Thank you to all the great people and friends I met that week. I'm always happy to connect with other like-minded people. For someone who spends most of his time at home, it's really important and valuable to get the most out of these experiences to recharge and feel truly connected to the world. This also reminds me of my passion for the creative space and allows me to learn from all the amazing people working to create great products.
If you made it to the end of the article, I appreciate your time. I hope I have given you a good overview of my experience and what I learned from the event. If you are thinking of going to the next one in 2025, I hope to see you there and share the experience all together.